Many Universities have created education and scholarship career pathways or included ‘scholarship’ as part of the progression requirements for those on teaching-focused contracts. However, this new recognition of a full academic career has brought significant uncertainty for many who have migrated from ‘teaching-only’ pathways.
Whilst the debate has largely been settled in the literature, misunderstandings persist in practice with many uncertain about how to commence scholarship work or how to evidence it. Typically, scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is believed to support enhanced educational practices. David Walker and I found that at the higher levels of the career pathway the term pedagogic research starts to become more prevalent.
I’ve tried to list some of the main questions people ask below:
What then does SoTL require? SoTL definitions typically draw on work that educators are undertaking as part of their practice however, it goes beyond simply scholarly teaching. A helpful model proposed by Kern et al. (2015) can help to explain the differences. SoTL is public facing and the product of a rigorous investigation.
But I don’t have sufficient workload allocation. Workload allocations for those on non-traditional academic contracts vary significantly from those with no scholarship time to those with the same amount as those on research contracts. In addition, they can vary across an institution, making it difficult to compare promotion applications.
My tip would be to think about what you’re doing anyway and how that can be extended into a SoTL project. For example, you might be innovating in the classroom, so why not seek ethical approval to collect data, you might be writing teaching cases for use in class, so why not develop a teaching note and seek to publish it in a case collection.
Monitor your impact. Being able to articulate the impact of your work is important, not just in promotions but for external recognition e.g. Advance HE Senior Fellowship. What changed as a result of your work? Did it lead to something else? How did you measure the changes you made? As you progress in your career the impact will likely move from departmental to School to institutional to sectoral. For example, our journal article led to an invited seminar and hosting a #LTHEchat.
Focus. Your work should build on your teaching philosophy and methods and will often coalesce around 2-3 dominant themes. This helps build expertise and focus by helping you to target specific conferences and outlets for your work. Remember your work doesn’t have to be peer-reviewed journal articles. For example, the National Teaching Repository offers a great outlet for publishing teaching resources and can provide statistics to support measuring impact.
Some useful resources:
Susan Smith 